See my 2010 paper "'Places' spam - the new front in the spam wars." As I wrote back then, "The two phases of spamming Google Places are the insertion of fake business locations and
the creation of fake reviews. Both are embarrassingly easy." That hasn't changed.
Google doesn't fix this 4-year-old problem because Google makes money from bad search results. If search results take you directly to the business selling whatever it is you want, Google makes no money. If you're detoured through some Demand Media content farm, Google makes ad revenue. If you get fed up with being sent to ad-choked sites and click on a Google ad, Google makes money. Organic search that sucks is a fundamental part of Google's business model.
Technically, it's straightforward to fix this. Business data has to be checked against sources businesses can't easily manipulate, such as business credit rating companies. A business that reports fake store locations to Dun & Bradstreet or Experian will soon have a very low credit rating.
Bing or Yahoo could beat Google at search quality. They have the same spam problem, but it doesn't make them money. That's because Google has most of the third-party advertising market. Web spam on Bing drives traffic mostly to sites with Google ads, not Bing ads.
The real search engines are Google, Bing, Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia). Everybody else, including Yahoo, is a reseller. Yandex has been doing some interesting stuff lately with linkless search ranking, and Baidu just opened a Silicon Valley office.
Yahoo's Marissa Mayer announced last January that Yahoo was getting back into search. (They've been reselling Bing since 2009.) That appears to have been a bluff to get a better deal from Microsoft. There's no indication of Yahoo actually building a search engine. No relevant job ads, no data center buildout, no increased crawling by Yahoo bots, no high-profile hires, no buzz in Silicon Valley.
Bing ought to be doing better than it is, but they're reported to have management problems. Every year, there's new top management at Bing, and it doesn't help.
I'm listening to the recording of the radio communications. The drone was over 2000' altitude. At first, the cops in the helicopter aren't sure what they're seeing, and they first think it's a fast-moving aircraft in a vertical climb, over the East River. It has red and green lights, like aircraft do. They ask La Guardia ATC radar what they're seeing. ATC isn't seeing it on radar. Then they get closer and see it's a drone of some kind. In a few minutes it's over the George Washington Bridge, miles from the East River.
Once the guys who were operating them were caught, the cops are on the air discussing what to charge them with. The cops on the ground call them "tiny little toys". There's some discussion of "if it's over 1000', it's reckless". The cops aren't quite sure what to charge them with.
The FAA can certainly have them prosecuted. They were operating a drone in class B controlled airspace. That's serious, and dumb. Here's the New York City airspace chart. (Yes, there's actually a VFR corridor over the Hudson River; it's permitted to fly along the river at up to 1300' altitude. There used to be one over the East River, too, but after some jock slammed a light plane into a Manhattan apartment building by going too fast there, it was closed to VFR traffic. These drone operators didn't stay in the VFR corridor, and probably had no clue where it was anyway.)
The drone guys were lucky. LGA has two intersecting runways, 4-22 and 13-31. The one in use depends on wind direction. The approach to 13 and the departure from 31 are over where the drones were operating. LGA happened to be using 4-22 that day. If the other runway had been in use, there would have been a large plane in the area ever 45 seconds or so.
Any display big enough for development will draw more power than the CPU. (Although I suppose you could kludge some non-backlit e-reader into being a dev system.)
This problem should solve itself as downloading and cloud-based games take over and game stores disappear. GameStop is closing 120 more locations. Game retailers are going the way of record stores and video rental outlets.
There's nothing mysterious about this. The problem is that if someone gets control of circuit breakers for large rotating equipment, they may be able to disconnect it, let it get out of sync, and reconnect it. This causes huge stresses on motor and generator windings and may damage larger equipment. This is a classic problem in AC electrical systems. A more technical analysis of the Aurora vulnerability is here.
The attack involves taking over control of a power breaker in the transmission system, one that isn't protected by a device that checks for an in-phase condition. Breakers that are intended to be used during synchronization (such as the ones nearest generators) have such protections, but not all breakers do.
Protective relaying in power systems is complicated, because big transient events occur now and then. A lightning strike is a normal event in transmission systems. The system can tolerate many disruptive events, and you don't want to shut everything down and go to full blackout because the fault detection is overly sensitive. A big inductive load joining the grid looks much like an Aurora attack for the first few cycle or two.
There's a problem with someone reprogramming the setpoints on protective relays. This is the classic "let's make it remotely updatable" problem. It's so much easier today to make things remotely updatable than to send someone to adjust a setting. The Aurora attack requires some of this. There's a lot to be said for hard-wired limits that can't be updated remotely, such as "reclosing beyond 20 degrees of phase error is not allowed, no matter what parameters are downloaded."
Ignoring the racist whining, he has a point. Web programming really sucks. Even web design sucks.
HTML started as a straightforward declarative layout language.
Remember Dreamweaver? Macromedia's WYSIWYG editor for web pages. It was like using a word processor. You laid out a page, and it generated the page in HTML. It understood HTML, and you could read the page back in and edit it. Very straightforward. You didn't even have to look at the HTML. Back then, Netscape Navigator came with an HTML editor, too.
Then came CSS. DIV with float and clear as a primary formatting tool (a 1D concept and a huge step backwards from 2D tables), Javascript to patch the formatting problems of CSS, absolute positioning, Javascript to manage absolute positioning... The reaction to this mess was to layer "content management systems" on top of HTML, introducing another level of complexity and security holes. (Wordpress template attacks...)
It's as bad, if not worse, on the back end. No need to go into the details.
All this is being dumped on programmers, with the demand for "full-stack developers" who understand all the layers. Cheap full-stack developers. Usually for rather banal web sites.
Not only is this stuff unreasonably hard, it's boring. It's a turn-off for anyone with a life.
His fund has an impressive trading record. He had the big advantage of starting early, in 1982, when almost nobody was doing automated trading or using advanced statistical methods. Their best years were 1982-1999. Now everybody grinds on vast amounts of data, and it's much tougher to find an edge. Performance for the last few years has been very poor, below the S&P 500. That's before fees.
The fees on his funds are insane. 5% of capital each year, and 45% of profits. Most hedge funds charge 2% and 20%, and even that's starting to slip due to competitive pressure.
Simons retired in 2009. You have to know when to quit.
Abelson and Sussman is a delightful book for programming theorists. Scheme is a big improvement over Common LISP. Learning Scheme from Abelson and Sussman is straightforward for people who can get into MIT.
This is not most of the programming population. As someone else pointed out, programming today is mostly the creation of glue code to tie together a number of (usually buggy) components. Neither the webcrap crowd nor the appcrap crowd needs Scheme. In fact, if you have that strong a theoretical background, you tend to overdesign simple programs.
If Microsoft hadn't built such insecure operating systems, the problem wouldn't be so big. This is the company that brought you Active-X, autorun, and the ability to invoke programs from spreadsheets and documents.
Python isn't a bad first language. It has all the important advanced concepts - objects, dictionaries, closures, and threads. The syntax is reasonable. Some people are bothered by the forced indentation, but for new programmers, it will seem natural.
Most of the problems with Python are performance related. They come from obscure features of the language, such as the ability to do "getattr" and "setattr" on almost anything, including objects running in another thread. So everything has to be a dictionary. (This is sometimes called the Guido von Rossum Memorial Boat Anchor.) PyPy is struggling hard to overcome that, with some success. (The optimization approach is "oh, no, program did Obscure Awful Thing which could invalidate running code" - abandon compiled JIT code, shift to backup interpreter, flush JIT code cache, execute Obscure Awful Thing, wait for control to leave area of Obscure Awful Thing while in backup interpreter, rerun JIT compiler, resume running compiled code.)
AI as a field suffers from the delusion that we're one breakthrough away from strong AI. There were people saying that at Stanford in the mid-1980s when I was there, just as the "expert system" hype was failing. There is progress; the current generation of machine learning can do some things quite well. But it's not leading to strong AI Real Soon Now. We can't even do dog-level AI. Or mouse-level AI. Insect-level AI, yes. (It was bacteria-level AI in the 1980s. There is progress.)
More likely, we'll get robots that can sort of deal with the real world, and they'll be improved over time. (It's embarrassing how lame robotics really is, after 50 years of R&D. DARPA is trying to kick some ass with the DARPA Humanoid Challenge to get machines that can do something useful other than work an assembly line.)
We'll get programs which can deal with most business problems ("Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0"), and they'll be improved over time.
Hardware is not the problem. If it were, we'd have things that were very smart, but very slow. Then someone would rent enough Amazon AWS instances to make them fast.
The SEC started requring companies to file their earnings reports in the Extensible Business Reporting Language a few years ago. At first, it was only for big companies; now it's everybody. The SEC displays this info in a standard format on line. Here are the latest earnings for DICE Holdings, Slashdot's parent. Here's the raw XML behind that data. Turning that into verbiage isn't that hard.
I've been doing this for years at Downside.com, extracting the raw data from the human-readable text. This is now obsolete, but it's still running. Here's the same DICE financial statement as processed by Downside. That's Perl code that's been running for 15 years now. When it started, nobody was doing that. Now that everybody in finance has that data, it's probably time to retire Downside's old extraction engine.
It's another materials article. They do not have a "walking robot". They have one piece of synthetic muscle fiber hooked up to some supports. If they hook up an oscillator to the power, it jerks along. There are other artificial muscle technologies. This new one is supposedly powered by the chemical solution in which it operates, not by the electric field that triggers it. That's new. But if it's chemically powered, there must be waste products from the reaction that have to be flushed out. You need a whole circulatory system for the thing.
So consuming fuel even when producing no (sic) electrity.
No, it does not work that way. Natural gas power plants are big gas turbines, like aircraft engines. (Some are derived from aircraft engines.) When they are turned off, fuel consumption goes to zero.
Here's a wordless animation from China showing the details of how a big gas turbine plant starts up and runs. It's very clear, and not dumbed down.
So they had a bad meeting. It happens. It's even worse across language barriers. Most successful business teams get over that.
Google gets that automatic driving can kill people. The guys from social pushing "Cruise" put shiny plastic on lane keeping and adaptive cruise control and call it automatic driiving. They're right in the middle of the "deadly valley" - it's good enough you can take your hands off the wheel, but not good enough you can trust it. Those guys are going to be a problem.
GM is in serious legal and PR trouble right now because they have an ignition switch problem which causes cars to stop if people have a keychain with too much stuff on it. 13 GM people have already been fired. Google has never faced having to take responsibility like that.
The software industry is used to being able to dump its product liability on the customer. This will not work in the "Internet of Things".
The EIA (US) and German statistics show that, in aggregate, wind-energy sources produce a relatively steady amount of power. Individual turbines and even whole wind farms might not be deterministic, but all the wind farms taken together... are.
In the real world, they're not. Here's the current CAISO output graph for all of California (which is 800 miles long and has a wide range of climate zones, with wind farms hundreds of miles apart) in the last 24 hours. Max wind generation today: 3600MW. Min: 300MW. That's over a 10:1 ratio. Checking PJM (the power grid for the northeastern US), today's max was 3200MW. Min: 900MW. About 3.5:1. Most days, those ratios are around 4:1.
So you still need a lot of natural gas plants that can be started up when the wind fails. Understand that load varies about 3:1 over the course of a day, in a predictable way, with peak load in midafternoon.
Solar power output matches air conditioning load very nicely. Wind, not so much.
The price of bulk power goes way down late at night. Once in a while it goes negative for an hour or two. This happens on PJM when load is low, Ontario Hydro has excess water they're running through generators, the nuclear plants are running smoothly and don't want to shut down, and the wind turbines are getting good wind. The hydro and nuclear guys have a slow response time, so they'll pay to generate power rather than shut down for a few hours. So the wind guys, who can stop in a minute or two, drop out rather than pay. The turbine blades go to zero pitch and feather, the brakes come on, and the turbines slow and stop.
Read the entire paper, not the summary. There are some interesting points there. One is that NSA does not have a shortage of cybersecurity experts. That's because they train them. It takes three years of full-time training. The agencies that complain that they can't find anybody aren't investing in their people in the way that NSA does. Other agencies don't invest in their people like that.
This is typical of employer whining about not being able to get the people they want. Sure, the companies who want people with some very specific skill set, right now, often at low pay, can't find them. Organizations that are willing to train people don't have those problems.
One unexpected item from the paper: "One operating system, having been installed in almost a billion devices, has yet to attract malware in any significant way -- although it is falls short of being
provably secure." What are they talking about? QNX? VxWorks?
Doing this is called Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, or SLAM. There's been enormous progress in that in the last decade. The basic idea is to take a large number of images of the same scene, possibly with inacccurate data about where they were taken, and build up a 3D model. It sort of works most of the time. Some algorithms do well indoors, especially where there are lots of strong edges and corners. Those are easy features to lock onto. Outdoors is tougher, although outdoors you can usually use GPS. It's a basic capabiilty robots need.
The video is frustrating. There's no comparison with previous work. Is this an advance, or did they just use known algorithms.
There's a way to do video compression so that frame rate doesn't matter. It's called Framefree. (PowerPoint, unfortunately). With that, you can crank up the playback frame rate as high as the output device can go.
Framefree was developed at Kerner Optical, which was spun off from Lucasfilm. Kerner went out of business a few years ago, and although there was a web site "framefree.us" and even a browser plug-in, it never caught on.
The idea is that the intermediate frames between key frames are mesh-based morphs, rather than MPEG-type block updates. Compression is compute-intensive, and playback requires a GPU. You can generate as many intermediate frames between keyframes as you want. Intermediate frame generation means interpolating the mesh points and then warping the image pieces to fit. So not only can you have very high display frame rates, you can also have ultra-slow slow motion. No MPEG-type blockiness, either.
While Framefree compression never caught on (probably because a high performance GPU in every set top box and DVD player was too expensive back then)
the technology is used in sports programming to generate ultra-slow slow motion without using ultra-high frame rate cameras. Maybe it will make a comeback in the era of "4K" video with 60FPS frame rates.
Slashdot Mirror
See my 2010 paper "'Places' spam - the new front in the spam wars." As I wrote back then, "The two phases of spamming Google Places are the insertion of fake business locations and the creation of fake reviews. Both are embarrassingly easy." That hasn't changed.
Google doesn't fix this 4-year-old problem because Google makes money from bad search results. If search results take you directly to the business selling whatever it is you want, Google makes no money. If you're detoured through some Demand Media content farm, Google makes ad revenue. If you get fed up with being sent to ad-choked sites and click on a Google ad, Google makes money. Organic search that sucks is a fundamental part of Google's business model.
Technically, it's straightforward to fix this. Business data has to be checked against sources businesses can't easily manipulate, such as business credit rating companies. A business that reports fake store locations to Dun & Bradstreet or Experian will soon have a very low credit rating.
Bing or Yahoo could beat Google at search quality. They have the same spam problem, but it doesn't make them money. That's because Google has most of the third-party advertising market. Web spam on Bing drives traffic mostly to sites with Google ads, not Bing ads.
The real search engines are Google, Bing, Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia). Everybody else, including Yahoo, is a reseller. Yandex has been doing some interesting stuff lately with linkless search ranking, and Baidu just opened a Silicon Valley office.
Yahoo's Marissa Mayer announced last January that Yahoo was getting back into search. (They've been reselling Bing since 2009.) That appears to have been a bluff to get a better deal from Microsoft. There's no indication of Yahoo actually building a search engine. No relevant job ads, no data center buildout, no increased crawling by Yahoo bots, no high-profile hires, no buzz in Silicon Valley.
Bing ought to be doing better than it is, but they're reported to have management problems. Every year, there's new top management at Bing, and it doesn't help.
I'm listening to the recording of the radio communications. The drone was over 2000' altitude. At first, the cops in the helicopter aren't sure what they're seeing, and they first think it's a fast-moving aircraft in a vertical climb, over the East River. It has red and green lights, like aircraft do. They ask La Guardia ATC radar what they're seeing. ATC isn't seeing it on radar. Then they get closer and see it's a drone of some kind. In a few minutes it's over the George Washington Bridge, miles from the East River.
Once the guys who were operating them were caught, the cops are on the air discussing what to charge them with. The cops on the ground call them "tiny little toys". There's some discussion of "if it's over 1000', it's reckless". The cops aren't quite sure what to charge them with.
The FAA can certainly have them prosecuted. They were operating a drone in class B controlled airspace. That's serious, and dumb. Here's the New York City airspace chart. (Yes, there's actually a VFR corridor over the Hudson River; it's permitted to fly along the river at up to 1300' altitude. There used to be one over the East River, too, but after some jock slammed a light plane into a Manhattan apartment building by going too fast there, it was closed to VFR traffic. These drone operators didn't stay in the VFR corridor, and probably had no clue where it was anyway.)
The drone guys were lucky. LGA has two intersecting runways, 4-22 and 13-31. The one in use depends on wind direction. The approach to 13 and the departure from 31 are over where the drones were operating. LGA happened to be using 4-22 that day. If the other runway had been in use, there would have been a large plane in the area ever 45 seconds or so.
You're describing Core War. You can still get the source.
Any display big enough for development will draw more power than the CPU. (Although I suppose you could kludge some non-backlit e-reader into being a dev system.)
This problem should solve itself as downloading and cloud-based games take over and game stores disappear. GameStop is closing 120 more locations. Game retailers are going the way of record stores and video rental outlets.
There's nothing mysterious about this. The problem is that if someone gets control of circuit breakers for large rotating equipment, they may be able to disconnect it, let it get out of sync, and reconnect it. This causes huge stresses on motor and generator windings and may damage larger equipment. This is a classic problem in AC electrical systems. A more technical analysis of the Aurora vulnerability is here.
The attack involves taking over control of a power breaker in the transmission system, one that isn't protected by a device that checks for an in-phase condition. Breakers that are intended to be used during synchronization (such as the ones nearest generators) have such protections, but not all breakers do.
Protective relaying in power systems is complicated, because big transient events occur now and then. A lightning strike is a normal event in transmission systems. The system can tolerate many disruptive events, and you don't want to shut everything down and go to full blackout because the fault detection is overly sensitive. A big inductive load joining the grid looks much like an Aurora attack for the first few cycle or two.
There's a problem with someone reprogramming the setpoints on protective relays. This is the classic "let's make it remotely updatable" problem. It's so much easier today to make things remotely updatable than to send someone to adjust a setting. The Aurora attack requires some of this. There's a lot to be said for hard-wired limits that can't be updated remotely, such as "reclosing beyond 20 degrees of phase error is not allowed, no matter what parameters are downloaded."
Ignoring the racist whining, he has a point. Web programming really sucks. Even web design sucks.
HTML started as a straightforward declarative layout language. Remember Dreamweaver? Macromedia's WYSIWYG editor for web pages. It was like using a word processor. You laid out a page, and it generated the page in HTML. It understood HTML, and you could read the page back in and edit it. Very straightforward. You didn't even have to look at the HTML. Back then, Netscape Navigator came with an HTML editor, too.
Then came CSS. DIV with float and clear as a primary formatting tool (a 1D concept and a huge step backwards from 2D tables), Javascript to patch the formatting problems of CSS, absolute positioning, Javascript to manage absolute positioning... The reaction to this mess was to layer "content management systems" on top of HTML, introducing another level of complexity and security holes. (Wordpress template attacks...)
It's as bad, if not worse, on the back end. No need to go into the details.
All this is being dumped on programmers, with the demand for "full-stack developers" who understand all the layers. Cheap full-stack developers. Usually for rather banal web sites.
Not only is this stuff unreasonably hard, it's boring. It's a turn-off for anyone with a life.
His fund has an impressive trading record. He had the big advantage of starting early, in 1982, when almost nobody was doing automated trading or using advanced statistical methods. Their best years were 1982-1999. Now everybody grinds on vast amounts of data, and it's much tougher to find an edge. Performance for the last few years has been very poor, below the S&P 500. That's before fees.
The fees on his funds are insane. 5% of capital each year, and 45% of profits. Most hedge funds charge 2% and 20%, and even that's starting to slip due to competitive pressure.
Simons retired in 2009. You have to know when to quit.
Abelson and Sussman is a delightful book for programming theorists. Scheme is a big improvement over Common LISP. Learning Scheme from Abelson and Sussman is straightforward for people who can get into MIT.
This is not most of the programming population. As someone else pointed out, programming today is mostly the creation of glue code to tie together a number of (usually buggy) components. Neither the webcrap crowd nor the appcrap crowd needs Scheme. In fact, if you have that strong a theoretical background, you tend to overdesign simple programs.
If Microsoft hadn't built such insecure operating systems, the problem wouldn't be so big. This is the company that brought you Active-X, autorun, and the ability to invoke programs from spreadsheets and documents.
Python isn't a bad first language. It has all the important advanced concepts - objects, dictionaries, closures, and threads. The syntax is reasonable. Some people are bothered by the forced indentation, but for new programmers, it will seem natural.
Most of the problems with Python are performance related. They come from obscure features of the language, such as the ability to do "getattr" and "setattr" on almost anything, including objects running in another thread. So everything has to be a dictionary. (This is sometimes called the Guido von Rossum Memorial Boat Anchor.) PyPy is struggling hard to overcome that, with some success. (The optimization approach is "oh, no, program did Obscure Awful Thing which could invalidate running code" - abandon compiled JIT code, shift to backup interpreter, flush JIT code cache, execute Obscure Awful Thing, wait for control to leave area of Obscure Awful Thing while in backup interpreter, rerun JIT compiler, resume running compiled code.)
Noticed that in commercial airports, they usually don't bother with removing the fog?
True. Removing the fog is very expensive. It can be done, though. Watch Fog, Intensive, Dispersal Of (FIDO)
It would seem like it would be easier for everyone involved to just stick with a tabular format of some sort.
Everyone who deals with financial statements professionally does that.
AI as a field suffers from the delusion that we're one breakthrough away from strong AI. There were people saying that at Stanford in the mid-1980s when I was there, just as the "expert system" hype was failing. There is progress; the current generation of machine learning can do some things quite well. But it's not leading to strong AI Real Soon Now. We can't even do dog-level AI. Or mouse-level AI. Insect-level AI, yes. (It was bacteria-level AI in the 1980s. There is progress.)
More likely, we'll get robots that can sort of deal with the real world, and they'll be improved over time. (It's embarrassing how lame robotics really is, after 50 years of R&D. DARPA is trying to kick some ass with the DARPA Humanoid Challenge to get machines that can do something useful other than work an assembly line.) We'll get programs which can deal with most business problems ("Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0"), and they'll be improved over time.
Hardware is not the problem. If it were, we'd have things that were very smart, but very slow. Then someone would rent enough Amazon AWS instances to make them fast.
PC boards aren't that expensive. What's the point?
I'd rather have fewer connectors. Fewer points of failure.
The SEC started requring companies to file their earnings reports in the Extensible Business Reporting Language a few years ago. At first, it was only for big companies; now it's everybody. The SEC displays this info in a standard format on line. Here are the latest earnings for DICE Holdings, Slashdot's parent. Here's the raw XML behind that data. Turning that into verbiage isn't that hard.
I've been doing this for years at Downside.com, extracting the raw data from the human-readable text. This is now obsolete, but it's still running. Here's the same DICE financial statement as processed by Downside. That's Perl code that's been running for 15 years now. When it started, nobody was doing that. Now that everybody in finance has that data, it's probably time to retire Downside's old extraction engine.
It's another materials article. They do not have a "walking robot". They have one piece of synthetic muscle fiber hooked up to some supports. If they hook up an oscillator to the power, it jerks along. There are other artificial muscle technologies. This new one is supposedly powered by the chemical solution in which it operates, not by the electric field that triggers it. That's new. But if it's chemically powered, there must be waste products from the reaction that have to be flushed out. You need a whole circulatory system for the thing.
1990 called. It wants its IR LAN back.
So consuming fuel even when producing no (sic) electrity.
No, it does not work that way. Natural gas power plants are big gas turbines, like aircraft engines. (Some are derived from aircraft engines.) When they are turned off, fuel consumption goes to zero.
Here's a wordless animation from China showing the details of how a big gas turbine plant starts up and runs. It's very clear, and not dumbed down.
So they had a bad meeting. It happens. It's even worse across language barriers. Most successful business teams get over that.
Google gets that automatic driving can kill people. The guys from social pushing "Cruise" put shiny plastic on lane keeping and adaptive cruise control and call it automatic driiving. They're right in the middle of the "deadly valley" - it's good enough you can take your hands off the wheel, but not good enough you can trust it. Those guys are going to be a problem.
GM is in serious legal and PR trouble right now because they have an ignition switch problem which causes cars to stop if people have a keychain with too much stuff on it. 13 GM people have already been fired. Google has never faced having to take responsibility like that.
The software industry is used to being able to dump its product liability on the customer. This will not work in the "Internet of Things".
The EIA (US) and German statistics show that, in aggregate, wind-energy sources produce a relatively steady amount of power. Individual turbines and even whole wind farms might not be deterministic, but all the wind farms taken together... are.
In the real world, they're not. Here's the current CAISO output graph for all of California (which is 800 miles long and has a wide range of climate zones, with wind farms hundreds of miles apart) in the last 24 hours. Max wind generation today: 3600MW. Min: 300MW. That's over a 10:1 ratio. Checking PJM (the power grid for the northeastern US), today's max was 3200MW. Min: 900MW. About 3.5:1. Most days, those ratios are around 4:1.
So you still need a lot of natural gas plants that can be started up when the wind fails. Understand that load varies about 3:1 over the course of a day, in a predictable way, with peak load in midafternoon. Solar power output matches air conditioning load very nicely. Wind, not so much.
The price of bulk power goes way down late at night. Once in a while it goes negative for an hour or two. This happens on PJM when load is low, Ontario Hydro has excess water they're running through generators, the nuclear plants are running smoothly and don't want to shut down, and the wind turbines are getting good wind. The hydro and nuclear guys have a slow response time, so they'll pay to generate power rather than shut down for a few hours. So the wind guys, who can stop in a minute or two, drop out rather than pay. The turbine blades go to zero pitch and feather, the brakes come on, and the turbines slow and stop.
Read the entire paper, not the summary. There are some interesting points there. One is that NSA does not have a shortage of cybersecurity experts. That's because they train them. It takes three years of full-time training. The agencies that complain that they can't find anybody aren't investing in their people in the way that NSA does. Other agencies don't invest in their people like that.
This is typical of employer whining about not being able to get the people they want. Sure, the companies who want people with some very specific skill set, right now, often at low pay, can't find them. Organizations that are willing to train people don't have those problems.
One unexpected item from the paper: "One operating system, having been installed in almost a billion devices, has yet to attract malware in any significant way -- although it is falls short of being provably secure." What are they talking about? QNX? VxWorks?
Doing this is called Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, or SLAM. There's been enormous progress in that in the last decade. The basic idea is to take a large number of images of the same scene, possibly with inacccurate data about where they were taken, and build up a 3D model. It sort of works most of the time. Some algorithms do well indoors, especially where there are lots of strong edges and corners. Those are easy features to lock onto. Outdoors is tougher, although outdoors you can usually use GPS. It's a basic capabiilty robots need.
The video is frustrating. There's no comparison with previous work. Is this an advance, or did they just use known algorithms.
Why should the Linux kernel have a compression algorithm in it?
There's a way to do video compression so that frame rate doesn't matter. It's called Framefree. (PowerPoint, unfortunately). With that, you can crank up the playback frame rate as high as the output device can go.
Framefree was developed at Kerner Optical, which was spun off from Lucasfilm. Kerner went out of business a few years ago, and although there was a web site "framefree.us" and even a browser plug-in, it never caught on.
The idea is that the intermediate frames between key frames are mesh-based morphs, rather than MPEG-type block updates. Compression is compute-intensive, and playback requires a GPU. You can generate as many intermediate frames between keyframes as you want. Intermediate frame generation means interpolating the mesh points and then warping the image pieces to fit. So not only can you have very high display frame rates, you can also have ultra-slow slow motion. No MPEG-type blockiness, either.
While Framefree compression never caught on (probably because a high performance GPU in every set top box and DVD player was too expensive back then) the technology is used in sports programming to generate ultra-slow slow motion without using ultra-high frame rate cameras. Maybe it will make a comeback in the era of "4K" video with 60FPS frame rates.